Mark of a man

Mark Wahlberg tells Stuart Husband why his latest role - in a remake of The Italian Job - is his most charming yet

Troubled youth in Boston: Mark Wahlberg

Stuart Husband

12:01AM BST 04 Sep 2003

Where is 'Marky' Mark Wahlberg? I've been assured that he's lurking somewhere in this New York hotel suite, but a cursory sweep reveals little more than the generic, anonymous grey furnishings endemic in midtown Manhattan four-starrers.

Suddenly, however, one of the sofas languidly stirs, and a familiar figure, pale beneath a messy crop and camouflaged in grey sweater and faded jeans, emerges from the cushions and drapes. 'Good to meet you,' breathes Wahlberg softly, his puppy-dog hazel eyes flicking between me and the Gummi Bear sweets he has cupped in the palm of his hands.

His demeanour suggests a timorous schoolboy about to be grilled by a careers officer, rather than the Hollywood star who commands $10 million per film and can be seen grinning broadly from The Italian Job posters that are plastered all over town.

There's a knock - a waiter comes in with a tray of water. He clocks Wahlberg immediately, doing a comically thunderstruck double-take. 'Um, water,' he announces, placing the tray before Wahlberg with great ceremony. 'Hi, how are you, sir?' says Wahlberg, brightly.

The waiter backs away, but freezes as he notices that Wahlberg's holding his gaze - the question wasn't, after all, showbiz-rhetorical. 'Oh, er, I'm great,' he manages to stutter. 'Thank you.'

'That's great to hear!' enthuses Wahlberg. The waiter, poised between gratification and mortification, exits, befuddled. As well he might be.

You would have contemplated the younger 'Marky' Mark for a long time before the word 'genial' sprang to mind. 'Cocky', yes. But 'genial'? Definitely not.

This, after all, is the man who stormed straight out of the 'projects' (housing estates) of Dorchester, a suburb that may sound like a leafy Tory enclave but is, in fact, Boston's equivalent of Compton. Wahlberg was the youngest of nine siblings - some full, some half- (thanks to the byzantine entanglements of his parents, Don Wahlberg, a Swedish-German bus driver, and his Irish mother, Alma, a nursing assistant, who split up when he was ten) - and was 'getting the shit kicked out of me by my brothers every day, and I mean every fucking day' when he was five.

By the time he was ten he was getting drunk on beer and high on dope. At 13 he left school and by 15 he was freebasing cocaine and selling marijuana. 'I ran with a tough crowd,' he says, 'and it was either fight or die. That's no bullshit.'

This Lord of the Flies existence reached a low when he was 16; after smoking a few angel-dust joints, he and his friends staged a robbery at an off-licence, during which he swung a metal hook at a Vietnamese refugee and gouged out his eye. He served 45 days of a 90-day prison sentence at Deer Island, a rat-infested rock in Boston Harbour.

'It's a cliché,' he says, cradling his Gummi Bears tenderly, 'but it was a total wake-up call for me. People I'd grown up with were OD-ing or getting shot around me, most of my family were in AA, and I thought, "I've got to make something of myself. There's got to be more to life than this." '

But not even someone as cocksure, albeit chastened, as Wahlberg was then could have foreseen his dizzying rise. On his release his brother Donnie - whose attitude and 'edgy' persona had won him a place in the late-1980s boy-band New Kids on the Block - took one look at the stunning six-pack that Wahlberg had cultivated in prison and used his contacts to arrange a meeting between Wahlberg and Calvin Klein.

Pretty soon Mark was grabbing his crotch through his tighty-whities from a 60ft billboard adorning Times Square. Donnie also oversaw Wahlberg's transformation into the white rapper Marky Mark; he was brash, crude and lascivious, the girls and gay men screamed (his homophobic jibes seemed to increase their ardour), his 1991 debut album, Music for the People, went platinum, and he compared Madonna unfavourably with the celluloid zombie Beetlejuice.

In short, he was a brattish forerunner to Eminem and his monster-of-the-id act. 'I wanna dedicate this book to my dick,' he says in his 1992 book Marky Mark, which also contains a full-page guide to the location of his third nipple, which, he assures us, doesn't bother him because 'bitches like to suck it'.

By the mid-1990s, however, he was disillusioned; his record sales were on the wane, and, although he had been offered his first part in a film - as a rapper in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993) - it was not the type of role he wanted.

'People were telling me it was a good thing for my career, that I could be the new Marlon Brando,' he says now, 'but I had visions of turning into the next Vanilla Ice. I mean, I knew Sister Act 2 wasn't On the Waterfront.'

A meeting with Danny DeVito and the director Penny Marshall proved a turning-point. 'They convinced me to pursue acting,' he says evenly, sinking back into the sofa.

'They were very upfront and honest in that East Coast way. They didn't lay any Hollywood bullshit on me. Once I got my first part [in The Renaissance Man (1994)], I didn't want to do anything else. I knew it could take me places I'd never been and get me access to things I'd never experienced or even had any interest in.'

Although there was initial resistance from the film industry - 'I had to really fight for him,' says Scott Kalvert, who cast Wahlberg alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Basketball Diaries (1995) - his role as the porn star Dirk Diggler, complete with a 13in prosthetic penis, in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) finally won over the waverers.

In the half-dozen films he's made since - including David O Russell's post-Gulf-War-One satire Three Kings (1999), the sombre The Yards (2000), in which he plays an ex-con trying to go straight, and the thorough drenching that was The Perfect Storm (2000) - he's evolved a casual, below-the-radar style as easy to watch as it is (presumably) difficult to pull off.

'I prefer to push as few buttons as possible at all times,' he says flatly, sipping gingerly at his water and regarding me steadily. 'For The Italian Job, Gary [the director F Gary Grey] asked me to be a little more charming and likeable, but I've never had that in the back of my mind before.

'All I want to do is be believable, and I always think simpler is better and more effective. I grew up watching guys like Steve McQueen and John Garfield who can convey a message through their eyes rather than chewing up scenery, and that's what I want to emulate.'

Scenery-chewing usually wins Oscars though, right?

'Yeah,' he laughs - a rare moment of levity - 'and I have no statues in my house.' Critics are divided as to whether Wahlberg's anti-style is effective - some maintain that he can't act at all - and it's true that those films in which he's assumed the leading man mantle - Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes (2001) and Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie (2002), a remake of Stanley Donen's Charade - have not done brilliantly at the box office.

But The Italian Job plays to his strengths. A turbocharged revamp of the beloved ramshackle 1969 original, it relocates the action from Turin to Los Angeles, replacing the old Minis for the new, chunkier models in the climactic chase, and, when it opened in the States earlier this year, did respectable business.

As Charlie Croker, the Michael Caine manqué, Wahlberg's mostly on cruise-control, sketching in enough joy-and-pain back-story to keep you interested, while the more actorly performances are those of Ed Norton (twitchy), Seth Green (goofy) and Charlize Theron (sultry, zombied-out).

Of course, I say, to us Brits the very idea of doing a remake of The Italian Job is - 'Sacrilege,' interrupts Wahlberg. 'I know. It would be like some English guy playing Jimmy Cagney in an Angels With Dirty Faces remake. But American audiences aren't familiar with the original, so we're keeping its spirit while playing around with it.

'And,' he says, not without pride, 'Seth Green ran into Michael Caine on a plane, who said he was a big fan of mine and gave the whole thing his blessing.' It figures - the king of can't-see-the-joins acting passing the baton.

And since Wahlberg has 'done' Charlton Heston (in Planet of the Apes) and Cary Grant (in The Truth About Charlie), stepping into another icon's shoes couldn't have held any fear for him. 'Hey, I don't give a shit who was there before, you know?' says Wahlberg, serenely. 'I don't think these guys are untouchable, and, anyway,' he adds cryptically, 'who knows what they were doing in the privacy of their own homes?

'The way I figure, if Tim Burton or Jonathan Demme asks me to do something, I'll venture into territory I normally would not. I want to work with and learn from these guys.'

'Learn' is the operative word in the reinvented Mark Wahlberg's lexicon. At 32 he has become the voracious student he never had the chance to be in his teens: a rigorous, buttoned-up blank canvas on which directors get to indulge their Pygmalion complexes (there's not a trace of his mean streets background in his classless, deep-but-muted tones).

Not that they underestimate his complexity: 'He can charm the pants off you, then he'll be with his crew and he's this street urchin from Boston,' says Stephen Herek, who directed Wahlberg in Rock Star (2001).

'He's a chameleon. Is it a con? Maybe. Is it sincere? Maybe. That's the thing that's exciting and dangerous about him.'

Such is Russell's admiration that he's written a role for Wahlberg in his new film, I Love Huckabees (due out next year), about a husband-and-wife 'interior detective' team who attempt to solve people's existential dilemmas (the film also stars Naomi Watts and Jude Law, among others).

'You know,' he continues, 'I was like a new-born baby when I came out of Boston. All I knew was my world, being one of the guys, making sure I was respected, kicking in heads, but that wasn't what I wanted for myself. I always had artistic interests. It's very hard to go against the grain, particularly with no example to follow, no one to show you the way.'

He's being a little disingenuous here; whatever his travails, Wahlberg has always managed to find mentors prepared to take him under their wing at crucial stages. As well as Donnie, there was George Clooney, who has looked out for him since they appeared together in Three Kings and lobbied for his casting in The Perfect Storm ('We're lovers,' says Wahlberg. 'That's a joke. No, it's more of a one-hand-washing-the-other situation. He gives me industry-cred and I give him street-cred').

But Wahlberg's first mentor was Father Flavin, his former parish priest in Dorchester, and the man who, according to Wahlberg, 'probably knows me better than anyone.' And Father Flavin's verdict on his former protégé?

'Mark is the greatest con artist I've ever met,' he says flatly. 'He'd be in court for busting open someone's head and turn on the tears and smile that beatific smile, and you'd think he was an Eagle Scout. He practically convinced himself.'

Wahlberg regards this as the biggest compliment he's ever been paid. It's not the first time the quote has been relayed to him, but he can't stop grinning from ear to ear. 'But that's what I do, that's my job,' he says.

'If I believe in the character I've created, other people can, too. That's why I have confidence as an actor. When you're the youngest of nine kids and your parents are too exhausted to care, you're left to your own devices and employ charm and toughness where they're needed. I mean,' he smiles, 'to this day my mother's convinced I was never guilty of anything.'

Wahlberg's past casts a long shadow. 'It always comes up, like people expect me to be in denial about it,' he says, shrugging. 'I'm certainly not proud of it, and I never used the old street-thug image to promote myself, like a lot of rap guys are doing now, but I know it made me what I am today.

'I don't feel like I have to take on the world any more. Now I'm older and wiser, more aware that I could end up back on those streets.'

What, even now?

'Oh yeah,' he says, incredulous that I should think otherwise. 'I don't expect anything to last forever. I'm enjoying this, but I could pack my shit in a hurry if I had to.'

Wahlberg is a frequent visitor to his old 'hood - he just flew in from there - but in a new, missionary-from-Hoodlums Anonymous mode. The Wahlberg family were nominally Catholic, and he reconnected with his faith while in prison.

'In the classic way you turn to God in there because who else is gonna stick up for you?' he says, laughing. Even during his Marky Mark period he attended church (it was, he said, the only time he ever took off his baseball cap).

Now he's on the board of his local youth club, he's paying the college fees for his nine nieces and nephews, and he's had a cross and a rosary bead necklace tattooed on his body, sitting incongruously with the Bob Marley on his left shoulder and the Sylvester and Tweety Pie on his left ankle (though you're unlikely to see this array any time soon - the former compulsive abs-barer now has a 'semi-official' no-nudity clause in his contract).

'I guess I'm the Father Flavin now,' he laughs. 'I'm focused on my old friends and their kids, trying to get them over the humps, push them to be creative, explore their potential. I don't understand why some guys think the fist conquers all. My brothers and I got out of it - two of them are [building] contractors, one's a chef, two are actors.' (Donnie stars in the hit American television police drama Boomtown.)

'My faith has enabled me to look myself in the eye and deal with what's in my heart and head,' he adds earnestly. 'I truly believe you can't be forgiven for something unless you're able to forgive.'

Is this community work some kind of penance or atonement?

'It's not about guilt,' he says firmly. 'No, it's what I'm supposed to be doing right now. It's why I'm in this position.'

And this new-found moral fortitude seems to apply to his private life as well. Despite brief liaisons with the actresses Reese Witherspoon and Jordana Brewster, he has for the past two years been in a relationship with the model Rhea Durham. They were expecting their first child this month.

All the women who heard I was meeting Wahlberg expressed a desire to do torrid things to him. Does he get that a lot, I wonder?

'No,' he says, as evenly as ever. 'Anyways, I didn't before I had a career. When I did, I took advantage of it to the max. That's where the guilt comes in.'

He claims to find relationships difficult: 'I'm afraid of getting attached and letting go, giving too much of myself away. I haven't known a whole heap of trust in my life, so I tend not to believe I'm going to get it. I don't like shit to be complicated and I don't like drama. I grew up with that and I ain't going back there.'

In fact, Wahlberg has recently strived to cut the cord to his past, moving out of the house he shared with his mother in Massachusetts and buying a place in Los Angeles.

'I always said I hated LA, the falseness of it,' he sighs. 'Then I thought, "Don't be so uptight, you don't have to deal with all the bullshit, the weather's great, and I've created my own little 'hood there". I just go from my house to my church to my favourite restaurants.'